Medical education increasingly acknowledges the importance of well-being, yet prevailing frameworks often remain tethered to transactional logics that contribute to burnout, moral injury, and fragmented physician formation. Many existing approaches rely on psychological constructs or organizational interventions without offering a coherent account of the human condition or the formative processes through which professional identity develops. By contrast, critical medical humanities scholarship e…
Read moreMedical education increasingly acknowledges the importance of well-being, yet prevailing frameworks often remain tethered to transactional logics that contribute to burnout, moral injury, and fragmented physician formation. Many existing approaches rely on psychological constructs or organizational interventions without offering a coherent account of the human condition or the formative processes through which professional identity develops. By contrast, critical medical humanities scholarship emphasizes that flourishing and formation are inseparable from the narratives, practices, and moral ecologies that shape professional life. This article develops an analytic model of flourishing grounded in theological anthropology as a wisdom tradition. Using interpretive analysis of exemplary biblical texts, lexical patterns, and narrative design motifs, we examine how formation processes give rise to divergent developmental trajectories of human flourishing or distortion. Psalm 1 serves as a paradigmatic Old Testament text, articulating pathways of narrative alignment, communal practice, and embodied identity as foundations of flourishing outcomes. These texts also illuminate the formative role of testing and agreement structures. We then describe the Eden–Exile pattern as a central biblical archetype for interpreting formation within systems that generate counter-flourishing, instrumentalized flourishing, or human flourishing. These dynamics are further extended through parallel analysis of the Beatitudes as a paradigmatic New Testament text. We translate these insights into a conceptual model of formation spaces shaped by agreement structures and oriented along a flourishing continuum defined by agency, trust, and meaningful impact. Formation spaces are emergent, dynamic attractor states within a formation ecosystem. We argue that medical education environments inevitably embody underlying assumptions about the human person and the good life; clarifying these assumptions is therefore essential for aligning physician formation with human flourishing in pluralistic contexts. By situating biblical theology as one interpretive tradition among others, this study contributes to transdisciplinary conversations in critical medical humanities and offers a framework for reimagining the conditions under which future physicians may be formed to flourish.
